Scientific research and medical testing require the manipulation, tracking, and storing of a large number of samples; each sample contained in an individual tube. The tubes are placed in racks in an upright densely packed configuration, most commonly arranged in industry standard racks originally de-fined by the Society for Biomolecular Screening (SBS) with the outer dimensions or foot print of the rack being 127.76 mm×85.48 mm. The SBS footprint ha been widely adopted in the industry and SBS tube racks are well known in the art. The most common tube rack configuration is an orthogonal matrix of 96-wells placed in 8 rows of 12 columns. The tubes may also be arranged in a SBS staggered or diagonal matrix, now commonly referred to as the honeycomb configuration. Alterations from the preferred embodiment would be required to accommodate this configuration and are not here described. Although the SBS footprint has been widely adopted by the industry, one skilled in the art would understand that this invention would also be useful with other tube rack configurations and the SBS tube rack is used here as the preferred embodiment.
Although these tube racks provide the benefits of space saving and allow for tracking and manipulation of many samples, the densely packed tube rack configurations makes it difficult to manually remove a tube positioned in the middle of the tube rack. The inside tubes are only accessible from the top. The tubes are too densely packed to allow a user's fingers to fit between or around the individual tubes to easily pick up or remove a specific tube, particularly with smaller diameter tubes. To further complicate things, to prevent contamination, a user is often wearing nitrile or latex gloves that decrease a user's ability to feel the edges of the tubes when the tubes are placed closely together. The lower sensitivity and the fact a user's fingers cannot fit between the tubes makes it exceedingly difficult to remove or access an inside tube. Furthermore, if the tubes do not have lids, sample-to-sample contamination may occur when a user's fingers touch the tops of the surrounding tubes, or it might cause sample contamination if the tube is accidentally dropped during an unsuccessful attempt at removing a tube.
The densely packed rack configuration also makes it difficult for a user to keep track of individual tubes during experiments or other processes. The tubes are packed so densely that the tops of the tubes are all but touching one another. A user adding to or removing from individual samples may find it difficult to keep track of which tube to access. This may also cause sample-to-sample contamination or cause experimental errors due to incorrect sample preparation when a user inadvertently adds to or removes from the wrong tube.
These and other circumstances make a simple and inexpensive device to raise a single row of tubes higher than the remaining rows of tubes for easy access, a useful tool in a modern laboratory environment.